The last of the Kennedys

In recent years, friends say, Mr. Kennedy had come to lean heavily on his Roman Catholic faith. In eulogizing his mother, Rose Kennedy, in 1995, he spoke of the comfort of religious beliefs. “She sustained us in the saddest times by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us,” Mr. Kennedy said, his voice stammering.

He attended Mass every day in the year after his mother’s death and continued to attend regularly, often a few times a week.

The Rev. Mark Hession, the priest at the Kennedys’ parish on the Cape, made regular visits to the Kennedy home this summer and held a private family Mass in the living room every Sunday. Even in his final days, Mr. Kennedy led the family in prayer after the death of his sister Eunice on Aug. 11. He died comfortably and in no apparent pain, friends and staff members said.

His children had expected him to hold on longer — Mr. Kennedy’s son Patrick and daughter Kara could not get back to Hyannis Port in time from California and Washington.

But the senator’s condition took a turn Tuesday night and a priest — the Rev. Patrick Tarrant of Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Mass. — was called to his bedside. Mr. Kennedy spent his last hours in prayer, Father Tarrant told a Boston television station, WCVB-TV.

Mr. Kennedy had told friends recently that he was looking forward to a “reunion” with his seven departed siblings, particularly his brothers, whose lives had been cut short.

“When he gets there, he can say ‘I did it, I carried the torch,’ ” Mr. Delahunt said. “ ‘I carried it all the way.’ ”

4 Risposte

Father Raymond J. de Souza has written this news analysis for the Sept. 6 issue of the Register:

Edward Kennedy’s Catholic Legacy: America’s Culture Wars

By FATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA
REGISTER CORRESPONDENT

In death Sen. Edward M. Kennedy hardly needs his biography recalled. His life could hardly have been more chronicled. What is more interesting to ask, especially in light of the Catholic faith to which he was so devoted — a family priest was at his bedside when he died — is what life he might have led and how American politics might have been different.

For Kennedy, the judgment that counts for eternity is at hand. Here below, his many public achievements have been lavishly praised. His was the most public of lives — famous for who he was before he was known for what he did — so that his private life was part of the public record. He experienced more than most the truth of those foreboding words of Scripture, that all that is done in secret will be brought to light, and that which is whispered will be shouted from the rooftops. There were few Catholics in America whose successes and sins were more published, discussed and judged. Now, his fellow Catholics surely pray for his merciful judgment.

The public legacy of the Senate’s greatest liberal and the last lion of his pride is a matter for public judgment. During his 47 years in the Senate, he was the most prominent Catholic Democrat in America. Many critics considered him a better Democrat than Catholic. Yet the tragedy of Ted Kennedy is that had he been more faithful to the public implications of his Catholicism, he may have been a more successful leader of the Democratic Party. The culture wars have not been electorally kind to the Democratic Party, and there is perhaps no person more responsible for the culture wars than Ted Kennedy himself.

“In some ways Kennedy’s career was the story of a man who might have been,” wrote Catholic commentator Russell Shaw. “Might have been president of the United States if his shortcomings hadn’t prevented that; might have been a powerful leader of the pro-life movement if he hadn’t turned pro-choice; might have been a model of the Catholic statesman in public life if he hadn’t become a symbol of American Catholicism at odds with the Church.”

What Might Have Been
A broader question is what might have become of American politics if Kennedy has chosen a different path.

By the early ’70s, Richard Nixon had won two presidential elections — the second one the greatest landslide in history — by fashioning a coalition that included cultural conservatives in large numbers. The lifestyle libertinism of the 1960s’ movements which coalesced behind George McGovern’s candidacy in 1972 proved culturally influential but a political liability. After McGovern’s loss and, a few months later, the Roe v. Wade abortion decision, it was still an open question about which direction the Democratic Party would go. Throughout the 1970s, many of the key Democratic leaders were pro-life, as was Kennedy himself up until the Roe decision. Had Kennedy resisted the culturally liberal trends in the Democratic Party, what might have been?

Kennedy’s family legacy, his impregnable position in Massachusetts (he won more than 60% of the vote the year after Chappaquiddick) and his national prominence rendered him immune from the pressures other politicians had to face. He could always choose his own path. Had he chosen to remain economically liberal but culturally conservative, he would have prevented the Democratic Party from embracing the orthodoxy of the unlimited abortion license. Had he remained pro-life the Democratic Party would have had to make place for other pro-life politicians. Had he remained pro-life many others — Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson — would not have abandoned their pro-life positions as the price to be paid for national ambition.

In the 1970s, it was not clear that the Republican Party would become largely pro-life. Party leaders, including Nixon, Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, George Bush and even Ronald Reagan, favored liberalizing abortion laws. The GOP moved toward a pro-life position in response to the Democratic Party moving in the opposite direction. It was politically advantageous, and it was Kennedy who permitted that advantage to be conceded. By the 1980s what are now called “values voters” were a critical part of Reagan’s coalition. Many of the Reagan Democrats were those who were with Kennedy on economics but could not follow him on abortion and related cultural issues.

The Supreme Court decision on abortion made judicial appointments more politically salient, but confirmations remained largely pro forma affairs — Reagan’s first two appointments were confirmed without a single dissenting vote. But in 1987 Kennedy led the opposition to the nomination of Robert Bork, turning the confirmation process into a brutal, partisan battle. The verb “borking” entered the political lexicon to describe this ugly new version of cultural politics. Democrats would later bitterly complain about Republican tactics on “values,” but it was Kennedy’s prestige that made such politics acceptable.

The ‘Ted Kennedy Problem’
It was two of Kennedy’s fellow Massachusetts politicians who would reap most directly what Kennedy had sown. Both Michael Dukakis in 1988 and John Kerry in 2004 were defeated in campaigns in which values — not economics, not competence, not even war — were the dominant issues. Religious observance had become the most important predictor of voting behavior. Culture had become a partisan issue. Kennedy’s embrace of moral libertinism facilitated all that. Had he chosen differently he could have stopped the culture wars before they started. Few other politicians ever have the influence to make such a consequential decision.

Indeed, had Kennedy remained pro-life — along with his positions on immigration, health care, poverty, war and peace — he would have entered his senior years as the great Catholic legislator in terms of the welfare state, health care, big government, the peace agenda and the right to life. Remember the famous pastoral letters of the U.S. bishops on defense policy and the economy in the 1980s? They were both well to the left politically, easily in Ted Kennedy territory. If only he had remained pro-life, he would have been the poster boy of the American bishops for a generation.

He didn’t, and so the final five years of his life were marked by an intense and painful debate about how the American bishops should deal with what could suitably be called their “Ted Kennedy problem” — what to do about Catholic politicians who promote abortion rights? Where Kennedy went 30 years ago, many followed. The old lion will be laid to rest as one of the most consequential public figures of his time. Those consequences have been difficult for the Church. That is well known. They have been also difficult for his party, even if the Democrats send him off with a full-throated roar.

BOSTON — The telephone rang early Wednesday morning in the hushed rectory of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica, the old Catholic church on Mission Hill. Phones are always ringing in old churches in working-class neighborhoods, but this caller, a priest, had a singular request.

He said that the Kennedy family — that would be the Kennedys of Hyannis Port, Washington, the world — wondered whether the funeral Mass for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who had died just hours earlier, could be said at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Would that be all right?

The Rev. Philip Dabney, the associate pastor, was stunned. All he had done was answer the phone, and now his life had changed. “I said, ‘Sure,’ ” he recalled. “I was so taken aback. But you know how grace works.”

Soon Father Dabney was working out the details with the senator’s aides.

No air-conditioning? We’ll send over several industrial fans.

Unsure about the sound system? ABC, the television network, will be on it.

When the priest noted that the sidewalk in front of the church was in the midst of being repaired, one of the aides said, “It’ll be fixed.”

By the next morning, Father Dabney said, “they were laying the cement.”

Here came a crew to spiff up the lamp posts and trim trees. Here came another crew to wipe away anything unsightly on brick. Remember that graffiti along St. Alphonsus Street? Gone, as if by divine intervention.

But there were matters at hand beyond the aesthetic. Matters of illness, and hope, and faith.

The priests here are Redemptorists — missionaries who built this commanding Romanesque church in 1878. Known locally as the Mission Church, it holds a special place among Boston Catholics because of its shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which is bordered by two vases filled with canes and crutches. According to the church’s official history, these strange but beautiful bouquets “provide testimony to the multitude of cures and graces granted through the intercession of Our Lady.”

In the generations since the church’s founding, several hospitals have cropped up within walking distance. Father Dabney said that many patients from these hospitals come to pray before the shrine, sometimes leaving petitions in a glass bowl.

“They’re looking for some sort of comfort,” he said. “The nurses in the hospitals all know about this place.”

And so it was, a few years ago, that Senator Kennedy began coming here, after his daughter, Kara Kennedy, began treatment for lung cancer. According to the priests here, he spent time reflecting and praying with the Rev. Edward McDonough, who for years was known in Boston as the Healing Priest.

Father McDonough died in February 2008 at the age of 86. Three months later, Senator Kennedy learned he had brain cancer.

That summer, a few parishioners reported to the rectory that they had seen the senator and his wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, in the church. There was no Mass, and no entourage. Just a white-haired man and his wife, reflecting for a few moments in an old, working-class church on a hill.

August 30, 2009, 12:21 am
Kennedy’s Papal Correspondence and a Spontaneous Sing-Along
By Sarah Wheaton
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s cortege crosses over the Memorial Bridge in Washington en route to Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday.

If Massachusetts was the home of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s spirit, the District was his professional home, where his spark turned into fire. The drizzle in Boston, the site of his funeral Mass, delayed the plane carrying his body to Washington by nearly two hours. When the plane landed at Andrews Air Force base at 5:30 p.m., the weather was different — hot, in the 80s, and mostly sunny — but the tenor was much the same.

At the Capitol Despite the heat, people started gathering hours before the funeral procession’s arrival. According to CNN, United States Park Police estimated that 1,000 people had gathered on the Capitol steps and 4,000 on the grounds at around 5:45 on Saturday evening, hoping to catch a glimpse of the hearse during its brief stop.

Some of the Senate’s most senior figures came out to honor their colleague. Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii could be seen sitting on the Capitol’s steps, and Senator Robert Byrd — who wept in the chambers while paying public tribute to Mr. Kennedy after his brain cancer diagnosis in May — received a sustained ovation when he arrived, in a wheelchair.

But it was Mr. Kennedy’s former staff members, known as the best on the Hill (their ranks include Kenneth R. Feinberg, the executive pay czar; Melody Barnes, a top White House policy adviser, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer) who were the focus of the remarks at the Capitol.

His “true contemplative leadership would draw staff and friends to new depths of compassion and understanding,” said the Rev. Daniel P. Coughlin, the chaplain of the House of Reprentatives, in his vocation. Mr. Kennedy’s son Patrick, a representative from Rhode Island, told the staff members gathered on the steps that tributes to his father over the past three days “should give you some sense of satisfaction of having done a really important job for this country.”

The Massachusetts senior senator’s love of music and country echoed around the Mall, first as Samuel Bonds, choral director of the Duke Ellington School of Music, led mourners in a rendition of “America the Beautiful,” and then, remarkably, as the crowd spontaneously sang “God Bless America” to send off the motorcade as it snaked, headlamps blinking out of time, to Mr. Kennedy’s final resting place in Virginia.

The Peter Pan buses carrying V.I.P.’s to Arlington stood out among the staid black sedans and sport utility vehicles — but perhaps the bright green buses named after the boy who never grew up were just a testament to the eternal youth Mr. Kennedy’s granddaughter would mention by his grave site. (More on that below.)

Pomp and Circumstance Senator Kennedy’s remains were buried between two large maple trees, at a comparatively modest site about 100 feet from the grave and memorial site of Robert F. Kennedy, which in turn is a bit more than 100 feet from the Eternal Flame and burial site of President John F. Kennedy.

All three sites are at the base of the steep hill at the heart of the cemetery. At least initially, Senator Kennedy’s site will have none of the monument-like qualities of the burial sites for his two slain brothers. After his casket was lowered into the site on Saturday night, it was marked very simply with a white-lacquered wooden cross at the head and a marble plaque at the foot that bears the name Edward Moore Kennedy and the years of his life — 1932 to 2009.

Though the senator served in the United States Army, he was buried as a member of Congress. In contrast to a military burial, in which a coffin is escorted only by Army soldiers, Mr. Kennedy’s coffin was carried, as the rose-colored sky grew dim, by a “joint casket team” consisting of eight members from all five military services and a ninth officer in charge from the Army.

After Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, offered prayers, military buglers played Taps. To a soundtrack of crickets, soldiers folded the flag draped over the coffin and presented it to the officer in charge, who in turn gave it to Mrs. Kennedy.

Letter to the Pope “They called him the lion of the Senate and indeed that was what he was,” Cardinal McCarrick said as he presided over a traditional Catholic burial. “His roar and his zeal for what he believed made a difference in this nation’s life.”

In a possible reference to Mr. Kennedy’s support of abortion rights, Mr. McCarrick added that friends “would get mad at him when he roared at what we believed was the wrong side of the issue.”

Mr. Kennedy’s deep Catholic faith – and his deviations from Church strictures – were a major focus of the burial ceremony.

The cardinal also revealed some of the content of a letter Mr. Kennedy wrote to Pope Benedict XVI that was hand-delivered by President Obama during a recent trip to the Vatican.

“I’m writing with deep humility to ask that you pray for me as my health declines,” Cardinal McCarrick read from Mr. Kennedy’s letter. “I’m 77 years old and preparing for the next passage of life.”

Mr. Kennedy wrote that his faith “has sustained and nurtured and provided solace to me in the darkest hours,” and though “I have been an imperfect human being,” faith helped “right my path.”

“Even though I am ill, I’m committed to do everything i can do achieve access to health care to everyone in my country. This has been the political cause of my life,” Mr. Kennedy wrote, adding that he supports a “conscience clause” for health care workers that would allow them to decline to perform procedures to which they object on religious grounds.

The pope responded with an assurance of “his concern and of his spiritual closeness,” Cardinal McCarrick said.

Next Generation The last words of the day came from members of the youngest generation of the Kennedy family.

“I can’t say anything,” said Kiley Elizabeth Kennedy, 15, daughter of Edward M. Kennedy Jr., through a sob. But then she did, contrasting her grandfather’s image as a crusader for health care with her own view. “To me, all the things he has done to change the world are just icing on my grandpa cake of a truly miraculous person. You see, my grandpa was really a kid. If you ever saw him conducting the Boston Pops, that’s what he was like all the time with me.”

She recalled waking up at 6:30 a.m. to find the patriarch sitting on the porch, his only company one of his beloved Portuguese water dogs.

“It’d be just us on the porch for a while, and we talked and talked, and I would get a feeling that the world was just right,” she said.

Edmund L. Andrews and Bernie Becker contributed reporting from Washington, and John M. Broder from Boston.

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That is the Catholic and charitable thing to say in response to the news of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s death.

Kennedy died Aug. 25, a little over a year after being diagnosed with brain cancer. His death brought forth encomiums from people high and low, nostalgic looks back at the history of the closest thing to a royal family in America, a recap of Kennedy’s greatest triumphs and most salacious scandals, and musings on how his death will affect the ongoing debate over health-care reform, an issue the Massachusetts senator held close to his heart.

On many issues, Catholic social teaching seemed to inform his perspective. He was a strong supporter of the civil-rights movement, for example, and championed a “living wage” for workers. His advocacy for an immigration system that would point immigrants toward citizenship recognized the right to migrate for a better life.

Internationally, he also left a positive mark: fostering better relations between the governments of Great Britain and Ireland and working toward a peace accord in Northern Ireland.

But while we applaud his work for social justice, we’re left to wonder why his grounding in Catholic social teaching did not extend to civil rights for the most vulnerable members of our society. Kennedy supported Roe v. Wade, opposed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and was a chief sponsor of legislation to limit protests outside abortion clinics and to permit the use of federal funds for research projects using fetal tissue.

In January 2008 he endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, reveling in the prospect of a symbolic end to racial discrimination in the United States but overlooking Obama’s strong pro-abortion record and stands.

What happened to change his early pro-life stance as it was expounded in a 1971 letter that surfaced many years later? “While the deep concern of a woman bearing an unwanted child merits consideration and sympathy, it is my personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life,” Kennedy wrote a year and a half before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old,” he added. “When history looks back at this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception.”

Perhaps a clue could be found in that 1971 letter: “It is my personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life,” he wrote. It was his personal feeling at the time, a feeling that could change, not a recognition of an unchangeable truth.

Kennedy once told an audience that he treasured his Catholic faith, but that he did not assume that “my convictions about religion should command any greater respect than any other faith in this pluralistic society.”

His relativistic sense and selective following of the faith seemed, then, to be in line with his older brother’s declaration to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960. When John F. Kennedy was running for president, there was deep and widespread concern that the Vatican would be calling many of the shots in the Oval Office. JFK put those fears to rest in the speech to the association of Protestant ministers. “I do not speak for my Church on public matters, and my Church does not speak for me,” he said.

JFK’s speech gave rise to a breed of Catholic politicians who would become epitomized by former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo — those who declare they are “personally opposed” to abortion but unwilling or unable to “impose my religious convictions on a pluralistic society.”

Unhappily, the political heirs to the Kennedys and Cuomos now represent a majority of key players among Washington Catholic politicians and Obama appointees: Joseph Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius, to name a few.

Interestingly, Ted Kennedy’s death came exactly two weeks after the death of his sister Eunice Kennedy-Shriver, at 88. She was a strong supporter of the mentally disabled, organizing the first Special Olympics in 1968. She was honored by Feminists for Life of America in 1998 as a “Remarkable Pro-Life Woman.”

She was a member of the advisory committee of the Susan B. Anthony List, a group dedicated to electing pro-life women to Congress. She once began a campaign called “One Million for Life” to recruit a million people to adopt unwanted children.

“How do you equate the life of an unborn infant with the social well-being of a mother, a father or a family?” Kennedy-Shriver asked in 1977. “If it is thought that the social well-being of the mother outweighs the rights of fetuses with congenital abnormalities, we do well to remember that more than 99% of abortions are done on normal fetuses.”

One can only wish that her more famous brother had embraced such sound logic. With his energy and passion for justice, a pro-life Ted Kennedy could have left this life with a very different set of credentials. How different the world could have become.